School Lunch Programme

July 14, 2022

Over the years the Wharariki Trust has been passionate about healthy kai. Particularly for tamariki. Having the best start to life is key for young people that are growing and developing

Our journey commenced with a community garden at Te Aranga Marae and gardens in schools in Flaxmere.

We then worked with Kimi Ora Community School to provide resources to employ someone to prepare $1 school lunches each day. Through our relationships we were able to source donated Bostocks Chickens https://bostocksorganic.co.nz/

Whānau were asked to not bring food into school. Which enabled the school to provide a healthy breakfast, morning tea and lunch, five days a week for the Tamariki.

Eventually the Government provided funding for school lunches ka ako ka ora https://www.education.govt.nz/our-work/overall-strategies-and-policies/wellbeing-in-education/free-and-healthy-school-lunches/. There are two options for schools to consider. The first one is to contract a supplier to provide lunches and the second one would be for the school to prepare the food onsite.

We acknowledge schools who are so busy and struggle to organise setting up commercial kitchens, employ staff and meet the compliance that the Ministry of Education expect.

We now currently work with those schools and their community that want to provide kai onsite.

To date we have supported:

Kimi Ora Community School
Camberley
Bridge Pa
Paki Paki

We continue to support Flaxmere College with morning teas. The school quickly realised their students could not wait for the government funded lunch, so we provide resources for morning tea currently.

We also support Irongate School and more recently Richmond School in Maraenui.

We are part of a local project led by Professor Swinburn aiming to address obesity and diabetes. There is now a collective of all schools which is led by Nourishing HB who prepare kai onsite. This is a fantastic networking collective that share menus, how to set up budgets, how to record nutritional components of meals etc.

Feedback from a Principal

This email is to give you some feedback on the impact of the Wharariki funded morning teas that have been operating this term at the school. Run by Moe, students are receiving a mixture of hot and cold morning teas each and every day, which is keeping them sustained until the government funded free lunch which is served at around 12.30pm each day. The students are enjoying their kai and teachers are noticing that students are settled and more focused in the period immediately after the morning tea break. Students are less hangry (hungry and angry) and no longer drift into the village to buy food -often not returning to school. We are very thankful and highly value our relationship with the Wharariki Trust.